Email direct marketing is an advertising strategy that has been used by businesses for decades. It is a strategy that circumvents other avenues for advertising like TV, radio,
and newspapers to send ads directly to customers via the mail or the phone. This strategy has certain benefits. The strongest of all is that companies can target exactly the customers they want. This is much more difficult using things like TV commercials or magazine ads.
A big development in direct marketing has been the introduction of email direct marketing. Simply put, email direct marketing uses email to reach customers instead of traditional mail or the telephone. You have probably received many such ads in your in-box from certain companies trying to advertise their products or services.
Using email instead of traditional mail or phone calls also holds certain great advantages for businesses. The biggest of these advantages is cost. Sending an e-mail requires almost no overhead. This is certainly not the case for telemarketing. To send direct marketing over the phone, a company will have to spend a lot of money on equipment, phone services, training, management, and other expenses. If not, the telemarketing will have to be outsourced at a high price tag. Only a sliver of the total of these expenses will be needed to perform an email marketing campaign.
The ability to conduct email direct marketing strategies and save large amounts of money compared to other means of advertising is facilitated by email marketing
software. This software is able to send out a single email to thousands of people in bulk with the click of a mouse.
The direct marketing aspect of this strategy comes from the existence of certain email lists that are used by these programs. The advertiser will only send e-mails advertising certain products and services to certain lists of people. The program will allow the advertiser to choose which emails to send to which lists based on certain criteria.
These criteria will tell the advertiser whether or not the people who use those email addresses are likely to be interested in certain products or services. This information may have come from the fact that a person used that email to purchase similar products from an online retailer. The emails may have also been collected from newsletters or forums that are some how related to the products or services the advertiser is marketing. Whatever the case, this information will allow the advertiser to direct market to these individuals.


